Since 2008, Democrats have replaced much of their previous strategic defensiveness, going on offense in the culture war. Under Trump, Republican cultural appeals shifted their emphasis from religious-based moralizing to ethnonationalist and antifeminist resentment. A thermostatic backlash to Trump’s conservative policies further advanced popular liberalizing social trends during his presidency. But each leftward advance brings counterattacks. Democratic goals often require complicated national direction and implementation, which can be effectively demonized. Social activism on the left increasingly operates within prominent social institutions, reducing demand for the construction of explicitly liberal-aligned alternative institutions while heightening institutional skepticism on the right. These dynamics have reached the topic of democracy itself, with academics arguing that they must highlight risks raised by the American right and Republicans seeing scholars moving toward the rhetoric of Democratic politicians.

Global trends in the rich world, filtered through America’s unique two-party system, have transformed each party’s coalition and reinforced contrasting views of expertise. Although the rise of social issues and the rising importance of education are transnational, they raise unique challenges for each major American party. Each side has responded by shifting its agenda and public image. Democratic politicians have balanced their instinctive reluctance to alienate culturally traditionalist voting blocs against internal pressure from party members for a socially progressive, intellectually erudite, and demographically diverse party leadership. Republicans have been compelled to defer to a popular conservative media apparatus that promotes aversion to social transformation and hostility to claims of expertise by nonconservative authorities. Barack Obama (the wonky advocate of social change) and Donald Trump (the plain-spoken, nostalgic nemesis of experts) both personify their respective parties. These party leaders repel as well as attract, reinforcing our two-sided politics.

Most people believe there are rules of civility that ought to govern our discourse in moral and political disagreements. These rules operate like the rules of just-war theory: easy to adhere to in theory, but in practice routinely abandoned by all parties for the sake of winning. Drawing on conflict theory and social psychology, I explain how social conflicts make it possible for people to break their own rules of engagement without recognizing that they are doing so. Indeed, the same public figures who speak of the need for civility and unity are often the ones most willing to resort to uncivil and intentionally divisive speech. In any “us versus them” conflict, the perceived necessity for “us” to prevail over “them” tends to outweigh other ethical considerations. The rules of civility, whatever their merits as an ethical theory, are largely ineffective at constraining immoral practices when the chips are down.

This chapter rewrites the history of Egypt’s constitutional period (1923–1952) by examining a ‘culture war’ that broke out between graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum and Europhile modernist intellectuals such as Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Taha Husayn, and ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq. From 1930, Europhile modernist calls for westernisation fell on deaf ears due in large part to the darʿamiyya. Darʿamiyya continued to exercise significant influence over the teaching and reform of Arabic, including as members of the Royal Arabic Language Academy (Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya) from 1932. Furthermore, darʿamiyya Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood and Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani of Hizb al-Tahrir advanced explicitly Islamic alternatives to state-led projects of modernity. Their example established a new mode of religious leadership, the new religious intellectual, available to individuals without significant religious education. Europhile modernists responded differently to this loss of sociocultural authority. Haykal’s switch to writing about Islamic topics can be seen as an attempt to co-opt darʿami influence over popular views of religion. Husayn’s call for Dar al-ʿUlum to be subsumed into the Egyptian University’s College of Literature was a direct attack on the darʿamiyya’s sociocultural and professional authority.